Category: Literary Criticism

It often comes rather late to an artist, writer, or to anyone who sees himself to be either or both, that the decision to be any (or both) is a disconcerting choice. In the end, consumers of an artistic production matter less because the production of a piece of art or writing anchors less on what the reader thinks than the artist’s. After all, the reader has long considered him dead, so might as well return the favor and do a piece of art or write as if the reader is as dead.

Let’s break the ice all over again. I have been absent here for a time that I do not know how to begin a post anymore. Shall I begin by posing a question, posting a picture, quoting a famous person, or writing a sentence or two of gibberish?

Most of the time I get by simply by doing the last of the options, but this is of course the most ineffective. Now it’s a wonder how I have accumulated 700++ posts. I seldom have been able to write a 500-word string of sentences without resorting to gibberish.

I enjoy reading gibberish because I do not have to exert too much mentally in reading them as they are usually written with a particular purpose, that is, they’re meant to be purposeless.

Gibberish writings, though common, however, are difficult to compose. They are more difficult to write than to read because any piece of writing, no matter how hard the writer tries, tends to have a specific purpose other than purposelessness. Purpose is a necessary aspect of writing and writing in gibberish is obviously something of an anomaly.

Like this writing, for instance. I may digress from my initial purpose but any reader will eventually figure out a sense of pattern independent of my intent.

And that reader will eventually sense that my purpose for writing is to confuse. She will close this page feeling good about the fact that she at least knew why I wrote this piece.

Realizing the writing might not be gibberish but her reading definitely was.

And yet whiteness is not a straightforward object of desire, any more than light is: blackness is desired, and whiteness is only the disappointing result of a desire that proclaim itself satisfied. Whiteness will be disavowed, as a truth that is either deceptive (as with the white spaces on the map, which hide the black continent) or illusory: the whites think that ivory, white, is the ultimate truth: but Marlow exclaims: “I’ve never seen anything so unreal in my life” (23). Whiteness may be an obstacle to knowledge, as with the white fog, “more blinding than the night” (40), which impedes the approach to Kurtz (Todorov 107).

One is often left to wonder what has become of our world today. We are all parts of a system that goads us to look at the ‘bigger picture’ but often we end up nitpicking about the most banausic of topics and non-issue. Most of the time, our nonchalance in the face of most events occurring before us is rivaled only by our passion for the least germane aspects of the issue at hand. What is worse is that more often than not, the issues we chose to get ourselves involved in are those that matter to no one, not even to us, but which we chose to get involved in still because in this age not being a part of a fight, not being a member of an advocacy group, not being driven by something, not having an opinion on something are tantamount to letting go to waste the freedom we are supposed to be enjoying, for not doing so is an unforgivable ingratitude.

And so we’ll fill any space imaginable with all the refuse our minds happen to contain. The internet has become an open dump site for all the trash we cannot afford to bleed into our reality, but, as is inevitable, this bloody business we are a part of is hemorrhaging freely into the material world, all for the sake of the ‘freedom (of speech)’ which we all feel we’re entitled to. It’s not whether what we say is inspired by some noble motive or that it’s a product of careful thinking, the more pressing question for us is whether we have something to say right at this moment. And there is where the peril lies.

This is how we cope with the gnawing insignificance the world is making all of us feel, but which none of us will whole-heartedly admit; this is a very human response to something as dehumanizing as living in this point of our present. It is perfectly human.

When we’re confronted with the uncertain, we talk endlessly, in gibberish, to drown any suspicion that this reality is a mirage. And so, to remind us of our corporeality, we talk, using a language only we can decipher. And the others, yes, they’re our conspirators. Of course, they also talk using a language, theirs, but certainly not our language. And, we talk, mimetically. What is interesting, however, is that there is a semblance of comprehension, a constructed reality existing in a vacuum, a phantasm perhaps, deluding us into thinking that communication has occurred when in fact what has only transpired is a useless exchange of meaningless but intelligent-sounding, grammatically correct, syntactically appropriate arrangement of words we all refer to as our opinion. Verbalizing this is the be-all and end-all of talk. After all, this is a time of unbridled liberty, where one man’s rubbish is as significant and as worthy of our precious little time as the other man’s puke.

I am back! (This statement presupposes that I was missed [note the passive construction] but in reality, or, to be more accurate, virtual-ness of the schema, there’s no here or there; our concepts of here-ness and there-ness were demolished a long time ago. Nobody is here or there as we’re all always everywhere. The lines ‘i miss you’ or ‘you’re missed’ are to be deemed meaningless.)

People nowadays think in Facebook status mode and manifest these bursts of thoughts in sentence fragments and ambiguous one liners. They say things in the shortest possible way, choosing the wittiest possible expression of ideas that are more commonplace than eating vanilla ice cream in a diner at a corner of a street or lodging a complaint to the world about a prick of an office mate that keeps them from their ascent to both social and economic superiority. People seem to wallow and enjoy thoroughly this exercise in triviality. The days of the rhetorician or the writer of lengthy discourses are numbered. Behold the dawning of the age of the impatient writer!

I’m about to sleep this time, and just as I am about to retire and ready myself for the tumultuous day tomorrow, I suddenly feel this urge to workout my fingers a bit and type in some paragraphs or two (in the hopes of gaining some musculature below my radio-ulnar area, or I’m kidding (though I am aware most of my attempts at humor almost always end up flopping)), which I am not quite sure will amount to anything that is worth your time, but you cannot fault me for being an irresponsible blogger or writer (as bloggers (at least most of them) profess that what they do is writing in its strictest sense) because postmodernism (or some ideas, more likely, by-products of modern society’s unabated theorizing) and/or some call it ‘God’ (also a by-product of unbridled philosophizing and/or faith) give/s them enough leg room to spew out as much rubbish as cyberspace allows them (me including) to churn, and considering the apparent infinity of this space, which is as huge if not more huge than the expanse of the physical universe, the production of garbage then is infinite, so is garbage itself, or rubbish as most English have more preference to call it such.

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